


War Terrors

by butforthegrace



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Marriage, Nightmares, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-17
Updated: 2011-07-17
Packaged: 2017-10-21 12:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/225112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butforthegrace/pseuds/butforthegrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>I fought the war but the war won't stop for the love of god</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	War Terrors

**Author's Note:**

> Filled prompt for the [Potter Wars Fic-a-thon](http://anythingbutgrey.livejournal.com/797887.html). The summary is the prompt.

After a while, it takes more than two hands and two feet to count the number of times Hermione has woken up in the night, screaming, sitting up in bed to reach for her wand, to strike out at someone who isn't there. She wakes up soaked in sweat, seeing something other than her dark bedroom, sobbing and shouting, and when Ron tries to put his arm around her, to console her, she doesn't see him.

After a while, Ron moves into a different room. He's apologetic about it, but he can't sleep at night; never knowing when the terrors are going to strike makes him tense and sleepless. She wonders if this is the beginning of their end.

Ron doesn't want to talk about the war. He grows sullenly silent whenever anyone else brings it up, and she wonders if that's her fault; he has to live with her nightmares and her scars, and maybe knowing that Hermione is reliving the torture and battles every night stops Ron from wanting to go back to it.

So she doesn't talk to Ron about it. She bottles up the fear and anger and anxiety within her, and feels like she's constantly about to burst from the stress. The longer she goes without talking about it, the more frequently the terrors happen.

She talks about it with Harry one day, on a rare visit when it's just the two of them; Ron had something else to do. (She doesn't know what. She was barely listening when he told her why he couldn't be there.)

“Did we really win the war, Harry?” she asks him. She'd never say it out loud, but sometimes she wonders if her dreams are real, and she's just hallucinating the life she's in, with a husband and a child coming, with everything at peace. How can everything be at peace when her mind is in such turmoil? How can their yard be neat? How can Ron be there every night, love in his heart and her name on his lips? How are they stocking a nursery to get ready for a _baby_? She still cringes at twigs snapping sometimes, flashing back to living in forests, travelling around England, waiting to see if Snatchers will find them—to when they finally did. She can't look at her scar without seeing Bellatrix's wand pushing into her arm, so she keeps it covered with bandages and long-sleeved shirts. (Hermione hasn't worn a t-shirt in years.) How could things go so quickly from carnage to peace?

“We did,” Harry says, and he sounds so reassuring. He's sitting at the kitchen table, and Hermione is at the counter, looking out the window onto the yard. There's a sparrow hopping around the grass, singing as if no one has ever died.

She turns around to look at him again. He looks paler than he used to. “Do you ever dream about it?” she asks quietly. “Any of it?”

He meets her gaze. “All the time.”

Suddenly she feels the need to spill out everything, get rid of her feelings, so she crosses the floor to sit next to him at the table. He takes her hand. “I wake up screaming sometimes,” she says. “Because I'm been dreaming about—about Bellatrix, or the final battle, or the Snatchers. I wake up screaming and I don't know what's going on, I don't recognize anything—I hexed Ron once because he was trying to calm me down.” She swallows, suddenly ashamed. “I didn't know who he was, Harry. _Ron._ ”

He doesn't say anything.

“He—moved into another room. Because he can't sleep. I keep waking him up, and he gets so angry at me sometimes, and he feels so guilty, and so do I. But he doesn't want to talk about it.” Everything is flowing out of her in bitter words, and she can't stop; she trips over her words in the rush to get everything out. “He won't even talk about the war, Harry. Not a word. It's like none of it ever happened. If I try to bring it up he won't answer me or he just changes the subject—lately it's all about the baby. I think he thinks that if we just don't talk about it, I'll stop having the terrors. But it's not working. They've been getting worse.”

“Have you been to St Mungo's?”

“Yes. They couldn't help. They said they'd probably go away sooner or later. I think it's going to be later.”

They fall silent, and Harry squeezes her hand. She rests her head on his shoulder, and starts to sob.

  


They stay like that until Ron comes home, half an hour later, and Hermione excuses herself to wipe the tears away from her cheeks. From the bathroom she can hear Ron and Harry talking about nothing in particular: Harry giving an update on Ginny, Ron on Hermione's pregnancy. It stings to see things go back to normal so quickly. She wonders if normal is the right word to describe peacetime to a girl who grew up in a war.

She goes back to the kitchen, joins them, smiling, takes Ron's hand in her own. He looks a little surprised; she ignores it, wishing that the surprise didn't hurt so much. She laughs at Ron's jokes, tells Harry off for some foolish thing or another, falls back easily into the trio they were in their school days. Finally Harry leaves, and as he's hugging her goodbye, he whispers that he loves her and he hopes she'll sleep well tonight.

That night, she has another terror, but not from the war, not the one they've already fought. Bodies are strewn in her front yard: Ron's, Harry's, Ginny's, and countless others. Someone she doesn't know is standing in the street, laughing at her.

She wakes up crying, biting her lip so hard it bleeds.


End file.
